"Nice Neighborhood, Great High School"

Home to Castro Valley High, Central Castro Valley is basically just a residential neighborhood that happens to be in the geographical middle of Castro Valley. This is not where you will find the main commercial area of Castro Valley, which is actually just to the south of here.

Castro Valley High School, as the flagship of Castro Valley School north of Highway 580 has an API of 9--very strong. Even stronger are the offerings at the high school and the achievements of its students across the board. Not only do they average higher than 1500 on their SAT’s but the school offers a host of AP and Honors classes, from Honors American Sign Language and Honors Orchestra to AP Japanese. This is representative of the Castro Valley Schools which are known for being some of the best in the area.

Oh yes, and Rachel Maddow and the bassist for Metalica, Cliff Burton are both alumni.

The neighborhood itself is mostly made up of older homes with maybe slightly more than half dating to the 50’s--these are, of course, smallish Ranch homes of the kind anyone who is familiar with California is quite familiar with in the older neighborhoods. But there is also a fair share of somewhat newer homes from the 80’s and 90’s, many of them total remodels of older homes.

The median home price here is around $400k with prices for single family homes ranging from roughly $200k to $650k (less than 10% sell for outside this range on either end).

There is some crime but it is mostly not of the violent variety.

Overall this is a pretty quiet, safe, relatively affordable neighborhood.

"Quiet Friendly Neighborhood"

This is a typically small town quiet neighborhood. It has clean streets, with little cars and people. It's mostly houses, trees, and greens. I didn't see much shops in the area, mostly just houses. This is a nice place to live, but not much to do for entertainment or fun. I didn't even see a movie theater while I was there, most of what I saw where houses and more house. It seemed really boring there, and I wouldn't really want to live there. People that I would recommend to live here would be retired couples that want a quiet life, no tall buildings and nothing fancy.